Tennessee football: NFL success of unheralded Vols shows how bad past coaching has been

No matter how great of a coach you are, you’ll have players that NFL teams miss on. When Tennessee football was the standard for NFL talent under Phillip Fulmer, there were still steals from there, including Jason Witten, Scott Wells and Arian Foster.

However, if more of your players are considered draft steals than players who lived up to expectations in the pros, that’s a sign that you underachieved with them in college. This is the situation former Vols are in right now.

When the San Francisco 49ers take the field Thursday night against the Tennessee Titans, they will be doing it with two rotational players from Tennessee football who were either taken in the seventh round or undrafted. The more regular player of the two was undrafted.

Emmanuel Moseley has started every game for San Francisco at cornerback this year. He’s in his second full season doing so. Moseley went undrafted after playing for four years under Butch Jones from 2014 to 2017 and only emerged because of injuries in 2019. As a result, this miss is an indictment of Jones.

Opposite Moseley, now, is Jauan Jennings, who is starting to see a larger role with San Francisco’s offense. He has 14 catches for 144 yards on the year, and his best two performances have been the past two weeks, catching five passes for 46 yards against the Cincinnati Bengals and six catches for 28 yards and a touchdown against the Atlanta Falcons.

Jennings and Marquez Callaway were the Vols’ two go-to receivers in 2019, and both showed a ton of talent, but Jennings fell to the seventh round and didn’t play last year while Callaway went undrafted. Well, now Callaway is the No. 1 receiver for the New Orleans Saints. He has 36 catches for 555 yards and six touchdowns on the year.

Both of those guys being missed on is a huge indictment of Jeremy Pruitt and Jim Chaney, and it happened because UT went 8-5 in 2019 despite a laughably easy schedule relative to what they usually play in the SEC. New Orleans is becoming Ground Zero for overlooked Vols, though.

In addition to Callaway, Shy Tuttle is now a starter on their defensive line. He was undrafted after the 2018 season and worked his way onto the roster, and this year he has 36 tackles, 14 solo tackles, three pass deflections and two tackles for a loss. Although his senior year was under Pruitt, the miss on him was more due to Jones and the failures while he was coaching.

Another failure on Jones’ part for the Saints is obviously Alvin Kamara. Their best offensive weapon fell to the third round of the 2017 NFL Draft but has become a Pro Bowl running back every year since then and the best all-purpose back in the pros. Why did he fall? Well, Jones had him as a backup or a by-committee starter with Tennessee football.

Then there’s New England Patriots fullback Jakob Johnson. His whole time with the Vols, from 2014 to 2017, he backed up Ethan Wolf, even though he was clearly the better player. He’s started five games in New England this year and has been a regular in their rotation since 2020.

Trey Smith deserves a shoutout as one more miss. Now, the miss on him is nobody’s fault. He fell to the sixth round because of people’s concerns over the blood clots in his lungs. However, he has started every game as a rookie with the Kansas City Chiefs and is a reason they now have the top seed in the AFC.

Finally, there’s Justin Coleman. A product of the Jones and Derek Dooley eras, Coleman went undrafted in 2015 and became the league’s highest-paid nickel four years later. A member of the Miami Dolphins, he has two interceptions this year.

Simply put, NFL teams have missed on far too many Tennessee football players in recent years. There isn’t some secret bias against UT. The Vols have just had too much bad coaching in recent years, so their players have been overlooked. It’s even more clear that Dooley, Jones and Pruitt have all underachieved given the current makeup of NFL rosters.